Nocera's discovery--a cheap and easy way to store energy that he thinks will be used to change solar power into a mainstream energy source--will be published in the journal Science on Friday. "This is the nirvana of what we've been talking about for years," said Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at MIT. "Solar power has always been a limited, far-off solution. Now we can seriously think about solar power as unlimited--and soon."
James Barber, a biochemistry professor at Imperial College London who studies artificial photosynthesis but was not involved in this research, called the discovery by Nocera and Kanan a "giant leap" toward generating clean, carbon-free energy on a massive scale.
Between 1870 and 1950, the average American’s level of education rose by 0.8 years per decade. In 1890, the average adult had completed about 8 years of schooling. By 1900, the average American had 8.8 years. By 1910, it was 9.6 years, and by 1960, it was nearly 14 years.
As Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz describe in their book, “The Race Between Education and Technology,” America’s educational progress was amazingly steady over those decades, and the U.S. opened up a gigantic global lead. Educational levels were rising across the industrialized world, but the U.S. had at least a 35-year advantage on most of Europe. In 1950, no European country enrolled 30 percent of its older teens in full-time secondary school. In the U.S., 70 percent of older teens were in school.
And what the 80-year-old T. Boone Pickens says, in a $58 million campaign, is that we can’t drill our way to lower gas prices. By implication, anybody who tells you otherwise — including the fellow Texan he helped put in the White House — is a fraud.
This is a political parable for the ages: the guy who was behind one of the knockout punches to John Kerry four years ago is now doing Democrats the biggest favor of the election by calling Republicans on their phony energy campaign.
Donald Rumsfeld described the detainees at Guantánamo as “the worst of the worst.” A more sober assessment has since been reached by many respected observers. Ms. Mayer mentioned a study conducted by attorneys and law students at the Seton Hall University Law School.
“After reviewing 517 of the Guantánamo detainees’ cases in depth,” she said, “they concluded that only 8 percent were alleged to have associated with Al Qaeda. Fifty-five percent were not alleged to have engaged in any hostile act against the United States at all, and the remainder were charged with dubious wrongdoing, including having tried to flee U.S. bombs. The overwhelming majority — all but 5 percent — had been captured by non-U.S. players, many of whom were bounty hunters.”
A lot of people seem surprised to learn that tons of people every day are "searching" for ebay.com or aol.com or just "ebay" or "aol" even though they can type those things into their address bar and get exactly what they want.
Everyone in the search business seems to mostly get this. The folks at those big destinations (like eBay) know this too. They have logs. But the rest of the techie population on-line seems to believe that normal people use the web the same we do.
They don't. And they never will.
..People don't get DNS, domain names, or the difference between searching and direct navigation. And since they all know what it means "to google" that's exactly what they do. You can either accept that or deny the truth.
..This ends today's reality check. Please go back to trying to change the world by explaining what the address bar is for. :-)
If you’re like me, you probably have a blog and use Google Analytics to track visitor activity. If you’ve not already got one, you probably want a “Most Popular Posts” section on your blog as it’s a great way for new visitors to find your best content. The only problem is that this would usually have to be hard coded, and would therefore need updating periodically after you’ve checked the “Top Content” report in Google Analytics, or it would require some server-side scripting and a database to track your page views and show the links dynamically.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could somehow use Google Analytics to display the “Most Popular Posts” section on your blog automatically? That would be a huge time-saver for you and would make it much more useful for your visitors as it would always be up-to-date. Unfortunately, Google Analytics doesn’t have an API, but here’s a method that doesn’t involve any server-side code or screen-scraping. All you need to do is use a few existing free services from Google and Yahoo and a bit of JavaScript.
Looking back at my family’s expenses over the past few years, I see big increases in our health care costs and in how much we pay for food. The rise in what we spend on gas is not nearly as extreme as our increases in categories like electricity and telephone. So why does the amount we spend on gasoline feel so enormous? I think it is because of the way we buy gas.
For the several minutes that I stand at the pump, all I do is stare at the growing total on the meter — there is nothing else to do. And I have time to remember how much it cost a year ago, two years ago and even six years ago.
..Perhaps it would be better if gas station attendants filled the tank for us, as they used to, so we did not stand at the pump watching the rising price of our gasoline. Maybe it would help if gas pumps came with bigger hoses so that filling up would go faster and we’d spend less time watching the meter. Or maybe we should just learn to examine all our purchases and expenses more holistically so that we see where rising costs make the biggest difference.
An interesting video from a former oil man who is now heavily invested in wind power.
This video is interesting because Pickens is not your typical left-wing guy. He talks dollars and cents (actually billions of dollars). And he does whiteboard diagrams.
WASHINGTON—A panel of top business leaders testified before Congress about the worsening recession Monday, demanding the government provide Americans with a new irresponsible and largely illusory economic bubble in which to invest.
"What America needs right now is not more talk and long-term strategy, but a concrete way to create more imaginary wealth in the very immediate future," said Thomas Jenkins, CFO of the Boston-area Jenkins Financial Group, a bubble-based investment firm. "We are in a crisis, and that crisis demands an unviable short-term solution."
The Kiwi is a small dashboard computer that plugs into your car’s on board computer through the diagnostic port (called an OBDII/CAN port) which is typically located under the steering wheel. The OBDII port can be found on almost all cars manufactured after 1996.
Using your car computer’s information, the Kiwi calculates four basic parameters associated with your driving style:
Academics are flocking to the Internet like never before, particularly to start a blog. Faculty members in colleges across the world are connecting with people on a whole new level. Let's face it – academia can actually be very lonely at times. Not only can a blog be cathartic for professors, it can allow for valuable feedback from students and/or colleagues.
Liberal arts subjects are wildly varied. From art to science, the major disciplines have long been considered part of the liberal arts. Below are 100 of the most interesting and popular blogs written by liberal arts professors.
When an extremely intelligent politician tells you over and over and over that he is tired of the take-no-prisoners politics of the last several decades, that he is going to get things done and build a “new consensus,” he is trying to explain that he is all about compromise. Even if he says it in that great Baracky way.
Here’s a helpful story: Once upon a time, there was a woman searching for a guy who was ready to commit. One day, she met an attractive young man.
“My name is Chuck,” he said, grinning an infectious grin. “I’m planning to devote my entire life to saving endangered wildlife in the Antarctic. In five weeks I leave for the South Pole, where I will live alone in a tent, trying to convince the penguins that I am part of their flock. In the meantime, would you like to go out?”
“I have just met the man I’m going to marry,” she told her friends. She had been betrayed by poor listening skills, which skipped right over the South Pole and the tent.
When C.C. Chapman noticed a blemish in his high-definition television's reception during the NBA playoffs recently, he blasted a quick gripe about Comcast into the online ether, using the social network Twitter.
Minutes later, a Twitter user named ComcastCares responded, and within 24 hours, a technician was at Chapman's house in Milford to fix the problem.
"I was so floored," said Chapman, who runs a digital marketing agency and advises companies to do what he experienced with Comcast - listen to what customers are saying about them online and respond. "When it actually happened to me, it blew me away," he said. "Now I have a case study."
A pair of Assembly bills designed to bring more young people into the voting booths are being fought by Republicans who worry that too many of those new voters will be liberal Democrats.
One of the measures would allow 16- and 17-year-olds to "preregister" to vote, while the other would allow 17-year-olds to vote in a primary election if they will be 18 by the date of the next general election. Both bills have prompted straight party-line votes, with no hint of GOP support.
During a segment in which Fox & Friends co-hosts Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade labeled New York Times reporter Jacques Steinberg and editor Steven Reddicliffe "attack dogs," Fox News featured photos of Steinberg and Reddicliffe that appeared to have been digitally altered -- the journalists' teeth had been yellowed, their facial features exaggerated, and portions of Reddicliffe's hair moved further back on his head.
With gas prices going through the roof and regulators requiring cars to be ever more miserly, Volkswagen is bringing new meaning to the term "fuel efficiency" with a bullet-shaped microcar that gets a stunning 282 235 mpg.
Volkswagen's had its super-thrifty One-Liter Car concept vehicle -- so named because that's how much fuel it needs to go 100 kilometers -- stashed away for six years. The body's made of carbon fiber to minimize weight (the entire car weighs just 660 pounds) and company execs didn't expect the material to become cheap enough to produce the car until 2012.
Canada is the best country to move to if you want to escape the dangers of climate change.
A new study by UK global risk advisory firm Maplecroft of nations’ vulnerability to the impacts of global warming found Canada was the most secure, while the Comoros Islands, off the coast of Africa, are least equipped to deal with future dangers.
Marion Mumford says scooters are a great way to get around town and save on gas. "The looks and the styling. I just fell in love with it, so I decided to buy it."
It's street legal, requires a motorcycle endorsement on your driver's license and gets great mileage.
"If I drive between 30 and 40, I'll get 120 mpg. If I drive between 40 and 50, I'll get 80-90 mpg."
One wild card now is Zimbabwe’s economy, spiraling downward at an accelerating rate. As the government continues to print more money, inflation has soared past a million percent, according to economists and business people. A loaf of bread is selling for more than $30 billion.
Opposition strategists ask how long Mr. Mugabe can keep paying the policemen, soldiers and informal militia whose use of violence bludgeoned the opposition out of the election. And, they note, even the government’s ability to keep printing money to pay its bills is in jeopardy. On Tuesday the German company, Giesecke & Devrient, citing a request from the German government, announced it would no longer supply the special paper Zimbabwe needs to print bank notes.
